shankar2k's Journal: It all begins with a Clean Room ...

I've been in a little funk of late ... It happens to me from time to time ... I just get so burdened and stressed out by my classes and whatnot that I sort of shut down. During these periods I'm amazingly unproductive, and as a result, I would feel guilty posting on my blog. Usually this feeling will abate after a couple of days, especially after I've had a good and long night of rest (I'm talking on the order of 11-12 hours). Then I get sick of lying around all day doing nothing, and I get some small thing accomplished. From that small accomplishment, I go on to something else and something else, until I feel my head is above water.

Ever since I've moved into Harvest House, I've never really given my room that good once-over, so the only time in my memory that it was clean was right before I moved all of my things in. I had been wanting to clean it for sometime, but I always had more pressing things on my mind. For the past six monthes, I've managed to keep it just clean enough to be useable. The room got really bad after Thanksgiving break. I was in the maelstrom of two tough classes, this whole coop situation, research, and a course I despised being a teaching assistant for. So as I said before, the room looked like a train wreck that a hurricane had passed over.

The inspiration came innocently enough. I was in Chicago and my cousin went off to work, leaving me in her home to babysit her daughter for a couple of hours. I had been sleeping when she left, and so when I got up, I went to check up on what my little niece was doing. She was watching this children's show called Out of the Box. It was a fairly harmless affair, about a Black guy and an Asian girl that play with a group of kids, singing songs, doing crafts, that sort of thing. Today's show was about techniques and strategies for cleaning your room up, and as I was watching this, it hit me: This is a task that *five-year-olds* should be able to do. I filed that thought away as I went to Urbana, because of course, I had other more important things to do at school.

But then the funk set in, and I was doing absolutely nothing (besides perfunctorily attending classes and maintaining the status quo). I then remembered this idea about cleaning, and it couldn't hurt because I wasn't doing anything at all anyway. So it was yesterday that I decided, no matter what else happened that day, I was going to have this room clean. I wasted a lot of time in the interim, but in the end I succeeded. You don't believe me? I don't have any before pictures, but anybody who knows me can imagine what my room probably looked like before. Take a look at these pictures of my desk, bed, television, and two pictures of my closet (1 2). My room is pretty nice isn't it! I knew that this was a great room when I moved in here, but that idea was buried beneath the layers of papers and things that had accumulated over the past six months.

This room inspires me. I woke up this morning and felt like I could conquer the universe. And that's when I realized this great way to motivate myself. I just need to come up with one thing that no matter what else happens that day, I'm going to get done. So for today I said I was going to do my laundry. I had accumulated five weeks worth of laundry (Don't worry, I actually have that many clothes, I'm not that gross). There was no way this was going to get done with my coop's washer and dryer, which by all accounts aren't very good. So I took all of the clothes over to the laundromat, invested about twenty dollars, and had them all washed.

This might all seem incredibly silly, but for me it is a landmark. I've always had problems with organization and motivation, and I think I may have found a system that works for me. I've tried all sorts of things, using palm pilots, online calendars, daily messages to myself, and none of them seem to work when I encounter any sort of adversity. However this "epiphany" or whatever it was came to me, to put it dramatically, in the depths of despair, when things were toughest. So if anything, as long as I can keep this up, it will only get easier. Now of course I know a lot of this is the initial euphoria, but I am optimistic.

And to think it only took a clean room ...